Cleaning Printer Heads

Why do printer heads block?
The answer to this is simple, ink dries on contact with air, we expect ink to dry immediately on contact with the paper, and as our demands grow for printers that can replicate more detail the size of the nozzles decrease while the number of nozzles increases, this leads to printers becoming more susceptible to blockages.

the most common kind of blocked printer heads are where no prints have been produced for a period of time, the longer you wait in between printing the greater the chance of ink drying in / or on the head, newly installed cartridges can also causes blockages due to tiny electrostaticly charged air bubbles blocking the print head these will dissipate over a few hours, after which a basic nozzle clean will charge the print head allowing prefect prints to be made.

The third and rarest form of blockage is caused by the ink it’s self, most inks these days are of good quality and don’t cause the ink to flocculate or clog. If you purchase your ink from a high quality source it is highly unlikely that the ink will be the cause of the problem.

Before we start on tips to rectify blocked printer heads, lets clear one thing up, doing multiple cleaning cycles will not cure anything, by running successive cleans all you will accomplish is the wasting of ink ( a lot of ink ), the filling up of your maintenance tank and causing ink to accumulate on the underside of the print head, which will make matters worse since it will dry very quickly and compound the problem.

If the blockage is not that bad and only a few gates in the nozzle check are missing a test print with a array of basic colors is often all you need  to get your printer working again, if the yellow channel is partially blocked, open Photoshop up, create a new page to match the size of your media and color it yellow, run 3 or 4 prints off, this should cure light blockages, if a improvement is witnessed but the nozzle check is still not 100% wait 30 minutes and repeat.

If the above does not remedy your problem or the blockage is more severe read on.

Basic information on unblocking heads Epson 1290 – 2200 printers.

Unblocking printer heads using Magic Bullet Clean Head Restorer.

In an ideal world you should print at least once every other day, in reality this does not happen, on days when no printing is being carried out it is recommended to turn your printer off and then but on, this forces the printer to carry out a mini cleaning cycle which will be enough to ensure that blockages don’t occur, most of us know this, and yet all of us forget to do it, therefore the following tip will save you a lot of time and ink:

Buy a simple cheap plug in timer, set it to turn off in the middle of the night and then back on an hour or so later, now every night the printer will carry out it’s own mini clean and keep the print head and nozzles from blocking. We sell Lyson Printer Cleaning Cartridges which flush your print head internally, and also an Inkjet Printer Cleaning Kit (£7.95 + VAT) which clears dried ink deposits which may have built up on the underside of your print head, for more stubborn bloackages we recomend the the
Magic Bullet Blocked Printer Head Cleaning Fluid.

For dirty rollers we recommend Platen Cleaner Spray. This will remove any build-up of dried ink or paper fibres. We advise you to use this spray applied to a sheet of paper to create a cleaning sheet, which will maintain your inkjet roller friction, and maintain good paper feed characteristics.